Why developers can't make the most of Nexus One's 3D performance

It's time to get ready for the science bit.

UK developer Distinctive Developments has been comparing the 3D performance of the Nexus One with the iPhone 3GS.

As always in these situations, it's hard to make a proper comparison. For example, although both devices uses an ARM Cortex-A8 processor design, the Nexus One's silicon is a Qualcomm Snapdragon running at 1 GHz, while the iPhone 3GS has a Samsung version underclocked to 600 MHz.

And for another thing, the Nexus One has a higher screen resolution than the iPhone: 800 x 480 versus 480 x 320 pixels so it's pushing 2.5 times as many pixels. Neatly Distinctive attempts to get around this by manipulating the demo game engine viewport.

In terms of a broad comparison, from the video, you can see that the iPhone 3GS is faster than the Nexus One in terms of frame rate, even with the viewport change.



By further manipulation, Distinctive proposes this occurs because the Nexus One is GPU fillrate-limited, but the CPU isn’t doing much better, mainly due to lack of access to floating point instructions, because such optimisations aren't yet supported in the Android Native Development Kit as they are with the iPhone SDK.

[source: Distinctive Developments]

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